USA TODAY Review

‘Obama and His Enemies’ is filled with rich reporting

After covering the past nine presidential campaigns, Jonathan Alter has developed an uncanny ability to provide his readers with off-camera details that are sugar rushes for the political geek.

In his new book, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, Alter's rich reporting shines through with these sort of behind-the-scene nuggets as he chronicles President Obama's path from looking like "toast" after the 2010 midterm elections to cruising to an electoral landslide victory two years later.

Obama's longtime political adviser, David Plouffe, observes that Obama was "better suited for politics in Scandinavia than here." Alter recalls that former President Bill Clinton felt in his gut that Mitt Romney would be victorious until Superstorm Sandy, just days before Election Day, gave Obama an opportunity to look non-partisan and presidential as he huddled with New Jersey's Republican Gov. Chris Christie.

And Alter reports that another one of the president's senior advisers made the point to include a visit to a bar on Obama's schedule once a week on the campaign trail. Obama didn't think he could win the white male beer-drinker vote, but the White House hoped to keep the margins down by slyly reminding voters that Obama was different from Romney, a Mormon who did not drink.

The scooplets, which Alter deftly sprinkles throughout the book, help make it a compelling read.

But Alter faces the plight of writing what he calls a "contemporary history" of a campaign that's been dissected and analyzed in seemingly every way. At moments, the book leans toward a rehash of what, in the end, was a pretty ho-hum race. And while Alter grapples with the president's difficulties as a political operator -- he believes Obama lacks the compulsory "schmooze gene" to be effective in Washington -- he offers scant amount of perspective on the big policy issues (immigration reform and gun control) that have loomed large in the early months of the president's second term.

Alter, who called the 2012 election the most consequential of his career, doesn't hide his disdain for Romney. He charges that the former Massachusetts governor would have "taken a machete to vital investments" for the country's future and was set to usher in a period where the federal government would have little concern about America's poor.

Romney thought he could capture the White House by turning the election into a referendum on a miserable U.S. economy. Obama, meanwhile, set out to make the election a choice between a champion of the middle class (Obama) and an out-of-touch rich guy (Romney).

But Alter comes to a different conclusion of why Obama was re-elected: Voters ultimately were turned off by a Republican party that was mean-spirited and out of its depth against an Obama campaign, which filled its payroll with data nerds who helped the president turn out the vote.

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